So the Tories have acknowledged that you can’t have an education policy which tells eighty per cent of parents that their children are going to have a second rate education and are worth no more than that. However, a certain fanaticism remains:
As a product of the grammar school system, I have been a lifelong supporter of selective education. Indeed, it is probably the single most important cause of my becoming a Conservative. Grammar schools entrench excellence. There is little doubt that the underachievement in lower socio-economic groups in England over recent decades correlates directly to the demise of grammar schools.
The first sentence is a bit of a giveaway. It’s poor man’s public school nostalgia – play up, play up and play the meritocratic game. The second sentence is just nonsense. How could grammar schools have prevented under achievement amongst pupils who would never have gone to them, that is the vast majority?
What he means here is education as salvage: we can stuff enough GCSEs into a few poor kids to make the general averages raise. The rest of them don’t matter. Good as it is to see the Tories abandon this model (and of course, the private schools lobby will be well pleased) they seem to have decided to replace it with something worse, namely endorsement of the present government’s academy system.
Grammar schools at least benefited the people who went to them, though at the expense of most of the rest. Academy schools seem to be about generating work discipline (just think, a call centre on your own campus), establishing a forcing house for management fads, and through the involvement of real live businesspeople promoting “entrepreneurialism” by a process of sympathetic magic. So the "choice" will be, as it is now, between Comprehensives and Secondary Postmoderns.
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